Organizing knowledge with our friends

On August 6-8, 2008, the 10^th International Conference of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) was held in Montreal. The conference theme—Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organization—was addressed through the lens of nine different perspectives:

• Models and methods in knowledge organization
• Multilingual and multicultural environments
• Knowledge organization for libraries, archives and museums
• Knowledge organization for information management and retrieval
• Epistemological foundations of knowledge organization
• Non-textual materials
• Discourse communities and knowledge organization
• Users and social context
• Systems, tools and evaluation

The keynote speaker for the conference was Jonathan Furner, former assistant editor of the DDC, who spoke on “Interrogating ‘Identity’: A Philosophical Approach to an Enduring Issue in Knowledge Organization.” (Those of who you have followed the Dewey blog for a long time and have exceptional memories may recall a previous [2005] posting by Jonathan on identity. Don’t be fooled by the “Posted by Joan”—see here for an explanation.) In addition, the current editorial team contributed to both paper and poster sessions of the conference, including “Making Visible Hidden Relationships in the Dewey Decimal Classification: How Relative Index Terms Relate to DDC Classes” (Rebecca Green), “Mixed Translation Models for the DDC” (Joan S. Mitchell, Ingebjørg Rype, and Magdalena Svanberg), and “DeweyBrowser and Multilingual Access” (Diane Vizine-Goetz and Julianne Beall).

ISKO conferences are unique in their combination of breadth (contributors at this conference came from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America; Africa has usually also been represented) and focus (everything is about knowledge organization). The total cast of participants varies somewhat across conferences, but a solid core shows up pretty consistently, so that enduring relationships are built and maintained.